Strawberries and Kangaroos

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

I said something to Tim a few nights ago about how bad he was making me feel by not talking to me. He came upstairs a little frustrated it seemed because he never knows how to talk to me about stuff. I was already starting to feel better having just gotten it off my chest, and him acknowledging the problem really helped so much more, of course. Sometimes I just get one little negative thought to sprout in my mind and then it keeps growing into a huge nest of weeds that spread out and kill all the pretty thoughts I have. I am usually so good at staying ahead of them, but nobody is perfect and insecurities happen. I always look back at it and see how stupid it was.

So I am feeling back to my happy every day self. I've plunged back into my painting. I tried to read some more of my book Dracula last night but wasn't feeling it. I am getting really close to the end and I'm not sure if I want to attempt checking out any of the movies for fear that I will get irritated at any part that does not follow the book.

It looks as though Tim's mom coming over for dinner and laundry on Friday nights is going to be a regular thing for now. She is coming again in two days but this time I will not bother to get sad for being left out. Not that I want to sit around with her. Maybe I will take the kids somewhere just to hang out since Tristan does not like her, or we can just all lay on my bed together again and find a movie to watch and read some books.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Yesterday day ended up being a bad day and I'm still really depressed today.

I had some errands to do and by the end of it I was really tired and dragging. Tim sent me a message right before I got back home because he thought I was only going out for some milk and didn't know why I wasn't home four hours later. So then I felt rushed. And every time I come home from the grocery I can barely get through the door because I have a dog jumping on me and two kids excitedly screaming that I'm home and wondering what goodies I might have gotten for them. That instantly hits my furious button. Tim only gets up to help bring stuff in the house when I get mad like that, as if helping me will keep him out of trouble. I don't want him helping me bring in the bags, I want him to pay attention to the kids while I'm gone. As soon as I get everything put away, I have to go through the house and see what disasters have been left for me to clean up.

So then I'm rushing around the house straightening up because his mom is coming over to do her laundry and give me frozen food to cook. Though I have no place to be complaining about free food right now. So I hide out in the kitchen keeping myself busy preparing dinner and playing with my phone. Thank god there we have a kitchen door and I can block her out just a tad more. Tim drops everything to spend time with his mom and sits down talking with her. Though he sees that dinner is ready, he doesn't bother to stop conversing with his mom to join me after I have fixed my plate and am waiting on them. I quietly get through dinner, wash a few dishes, and run away upstairs with the kids. Part of me is glad that Tristan does not like her either though I do wish he would learn some respect.

The kids and I just hang out on the bed watching Samurai Jack on my computer. Tim bothers to check on us once and I just ignore him. I go downstairs to get something while his mom is upstairs checking her laundry and Tim asks me what's wrong. As if we can talk about it while his mom is here. He mentions me sitting down and joining the conversation. As if he would even acknowledge my presence or even talk to me. I would not be joining them, I would just be sitting there, bored and ignored. He spends the whole night talking with his mom. About work and all kinds of things that if I myself asked about he would just shrug it off. It absolutely kills me that he will spend hours talking to everyone else about everything, but not to me. The kids and I are not interesting nor worth spending any amount of time with.

Most of the time I am able to keep myself busy enough to forget how lonely I really am. Everyone once in a while it creeps up and bites me, and like any wound it takes a few days to heal before you can forget that it ever happened. I have no companion. No adult affection or attention outside of the internet. I have no one to talk to about it because there is no cure. Except a good friend of ours from Misawa. I tell him that Tim is better off without us. He is a loner and will never be happy with life. If I wasn't so completely dependent on being supported by him, I would probably do him the favor of leaving. So that he isn't always bothered by us and so that I am not constantly trying my hardest to ignore him and pretend that I'm fine. Our friend say that he would miss us too much. I don't believe that for a second. He might miss us some, yes, but not enough. We are only still together because I gave up a long time ago.

First I was too depressed to continue painting, and now I can't even finish reading my book. I just want to be alone and miserable. Maybe even take a nap and let the demons of my sleep paralysis come for me.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Yesterday was very productive. I started the day by pulling out everything we have stored in the kids closet in search of more stuff to donate to Goodwill, and more importantly, finding my two packets of very important records and documents. Of course my precious folders were in the very last box in the whole house that I've looked in and I am so glad to have finally found them. In the last couple of days I have been able to empty out about seven boxes of trash and stuff to either donate or condense down into other boxes. We still have a lot of crap, mostly old papers and stuff from Japan that I'm not ready to part with quite yet, but it is definitely progress. Now all I need to do it find some sort of organizer for all of it so it's not just sitting in storage. I absolutely cannot wait to get a new book case for all of my books! Hopefully when we buy a house I will have my own special room or at least better space than what I have here.

Collie never felt bad again after her episode the other morning so I am glad that whatever it was did not stay with her. Tristan had a temperature yesterday and even took a nap late in the evening but he is back to normal again today.

Axl still has loose stool, which is mostly mucous. A thought occurred to me that maybe the problem is not our yard, but perhaps the dewormer that he received in December just did not kill all the worms in his body. He could have easily picked up worms from our travels to Troy or even the one time that we took him to the dog park in October. I do not remember how long it takes for an intestinal parasite infection to reveal itself as diarrhea and will have to ask the vet about it tomorrow when I get another Drontal pill. It does sometimes take two doses to clear out the infestation and I did not even think of that either.

I currently have two names that I need to paint letters for, which I stopped working on when I became depressed over our dire financial situation. Payday is tomorrow finally so I've been feeling better while looking forward to that but my creative motivational is still dead. I have plenty of time to finish them as I am doing them free for family members *edit: and they aren't due until May/June* and hopefully I can bring myself to get back to work soon. I have finished three other orders since moving here. Slow but steady, just the way I like it.

I really need to stop waiting until this late in the day to eat something!

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Being so completely poor right now makes me think of my parents. Every time we go through a hard financial time I always think of them. I hate that they have always lived this way. I hate that I didn't fully understand it when I was younger.

Recently a thought crossed my mind that I should not let Tristan know just how bad it is sometimes. But then I realized that I shouldn't just let him think that everything is always fine and that people never have to worry about money.

When I was in the ninth grade and didn't give a shit about my alcoholic mom and my solitary dad, I stole some money from my dad. My boyfriend had asked me for some money and I didn't question it. I reached into my dads coat pocket to see if I could find any money. I pulled out a wad of about eight hundred dollars. Not for a second did it occur to me to think about why my dad had that much or what it was for. I think I took half of it. My parents never said a word to me about it.

Every once in a while I think about this and it makes me sick to my stomach. Sick that I was naive and dated someone like that. Sick that I not only stole money from my parents but that I took so much of it. Sick that I got away with it. Sick that I now understand how poor my parents were and to this day I have not paid them back for it.

Collie came into my room this morning crying that she was sick. She was hot, her lips were lightly blue, and she was having a hard time standing up. I asked her if she had thrown up or if she felt like she was going to, and she said no. But I heard her stomach gurgling and contracting and rushed her to the toilet. She tried to make herself throw up but could not get anything to come out, just a tiny but of spit on her lips. We went downstairs and I put her on the couch and she asked for water. She has been fine ever since, but seems to have a temperature coming and going today so far. I hope that she stays on the well side and does not get worse again, and that the rest of us don't get it.

Axl is sick as well. He woke me up twice throughout the night with an urgency to go outside. He has the runs again and is straining just like he was a few weeks ago right before we went to PA for christmas. I had taken him to the vet for a dewormer, although they did not find any evidence of worms since he could not provide a solid enough sample to test. I gave him the dewormer and he cleared right up. For this to be happening again, if worms are truly the culprit, means that they are in the yard. I don't think that there is any way to rid the yard of parasites, so I just need to start making sure that I clean up after Axl immediately after he goes out there, and start walking him more. The yard looks like hell since it is winter and Axl has torn it up a bit from running around. His urine does not help either. I need to spread out a lot of grass seeds or something to make it nice again when spring comes.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Wow, six months have gone by since my last entry and so much has happened!

Back in August the kids and I moved to Lexington Kentucky, following Tim three weeks after he came here to start a new job with Lockheed Martin. I was absolutely dreading having to live in the same state as Tim's mother, but I am a hell of a lot closer to my family and friends in Ohio. Everything was going great and we even bought a new car. But I knew that buying a new car would mean that something big and bad was going to happen, and I knew exactly what that was going to be. Then it happened. Tim lost his job.

In a scramble to keep the money flowing, Tim signed up to go to Afghanistan for one year. He managed to stay long enough for Tristan's fifth birthday, and we took him to the airport the very next day.

Two days later, I got a dog! I had given up my obsessive searching for the perfect dog, saying that I am trying too hard...the dog that I am meant to have will find ME. Right away a new friend sent me a link to a dog at a rescue right here in town. I looked at him for a few days and thought about it. Tim had approved since he was gone, and I fell in love with him as soon as I met him. His trial stay at our house went perfect and he has been part of the family ever since. He is young and has a lot to learn but he is very smart and want so much to please. So now I have three kids instead of two :D

Halloween and Thanksgiving were spent with my parents in Troy. Tim's mom caused me all sorts of problems and finally I told her off. She hasn't taken to it so I still just ignore her as much as I can. For Christmas we drove to PA and it was so nice to be out there again. By this time Tim had quit his job out there and had signed up with Lockheed Martin directly, as apposed to his temporary hire before. We got to Skype with him while opening presents on xmas morning. He had tried to come home secretly to surprise me, but that didn't work out at all and only created a bigger mess. Due to a snow storm I was stuck in PA for an extra day and then spent my 11th anniversary driving home to Troy, where we stopped for a break and everyone had wedding cake. It was just as amazingly delicious as it had been a year ago! The rest of the drive down to Lexington turned into a nightmare as I ended up in a white out and had to proceed extremely slowly, tired as hell, and scared that we might night make it that night. But I just kept trying, made it home late, and picked up Axl from boarding the next day.

A week later, I was hoping that Tim was back in the states as I had not heard from him in a few days. It was getting late in the evening on the day that I should have heard something and I had given up for the day. Then Axl started growling at the door a lot, and when I turned around there was Tim sticking his face in the window! Alex and Jess had picked him up the night before in Indiana and brought him down to our house. I almost feel like he wasn't even gone for as long as he was.

In other news, as I need to wrap this up....my sister is pregnant and is having a boy!!! It is so weird. I never thought that she would ever have any children. She probably didnt either, but she had a fertility scare and decided to start trying. It took her a few months, and now she is due in May. I love buying her baby stuff :D

Well, the kids are still naked from their bath, Tim will be home soon, and I need to start preparing dinner. More later!

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Okinawa Yard Sales. For some reason having a real yard or garage sale is not allowed for the military members that are stationed in Okinawa, Japan. Instead someone created a website for selling that stuff that people don't want anymore. While I don't understand why you can't set up a few tables in your own yard to sell your stuff, I think that sharing your items online for everyone scattered all over the island is a great idea. It even works for people like me, who want to sell things that you made yourself.

I only posted on OYS a couple of times but I received quite a few orders very quickly. My shop on Etsy hasn't been much of interest since I finally took the plunge to open it on the first day of this year. I haven't painted anything in a couple of months and I'm ready to work on something. I knew that I could still post on OYS even though I don't live there anymore. I've been thinking about it for a few weeks now but I've been afraid to for fear of any negative feedback from people who like to throw around their two cents whenever they don't like something. But why should I care?

I don't. So last night I reactivated my old account and put up a listing for my work. I woke up this morning to a reply sitting in my inbox, and another one hiding in my spam folder! I am already overwhelmed haha. I don't like having more than one order at a time because each one takes a couple of weeks to complete. I wrote back to both of them so hopefully they will follow through!